"You might, possibly," I replied. "I am sure I never should. The Spanish which I know is scarce good enough for that."
"'Tis true," he said, reflectively--"true enough. Yet, you have the French. See, Mervan, here is an idea. I am a Spaniard and you are a Frenchman, for the moment. Both countries are sworn friends now as regards their government, if not their people. Why should not we be travelling together as natives of those lands?"
"An we were," I answered, "we should not be without passports. Remember, we come to them from Portugal; therefore, to have gotten into Portugal as either Spanish man or Frenchman, we should have wanted papers; and we have none. Consequently, the first question asked us will be, How got we into Portugal? Then what reply shall we make? That we came from the English fleet, which has just destroyed their galleons? That will scarce do, Juan, for our purpose, I think."
Acknowledging such to be the case, Juan sat himself down on the dirty bed and began to ponder.
"At least we will not be whipped," he muttered, "and at the outset, too. Mervan, we must find another road somehow, or, better still--there must be some part of the frontier which runs the northern length of this miserable land, and which is unguarded. Can we not get across without any road? Up one side of a mountain and down another, and so--into Spain!"
"'Tis that I have thought of. Yet there are the horses--also a river to cross. And, as luck will have it, the mountains hereabouts are none too high nor dense with woods, nor do they run from east to west, but rather south and north. Such as there are, you can see from this window," and I pointed in the swift, on-coming darkness of the November evening to where they could be seen across the river, their summits low, and over them a rusty rime-blurred moon rising.
Then I went on:
"Juan, we must tempt the landlord with some of that largesse which the old man who came in the coach seems to have distributed so lavishly--only, he has bestowed it on the Spanish side--ours must begin here. Come, let us go and see what can be done with him."
"But what to do?" the boy said, looking at me with his strange eyes full of intelligence and perhaps anxiety.
"This: there must be some way of traversing the river when there is no town on either side--if the worst came to the worst we could swim it on our horses at night."